Writer, Professor, Podcaster

Here is the testimony of College of Arts and Sciences Dean Dawn Weber. Weber arrived at Ashland University in the Fall of 2008, the same year I was hired as an assistant professor of English and Journalism. She was the only dean I had in eight years at AU.

Reading through this deposition makes me think that Weber either has an incredibly horrible memory or she is not being entirely truthful. I mean, she testified that she didn’t know who the president of the university was in May 2014.

I’ll tell you who it was: It was Fred Finks, and the provost was Frank Pettigrew. And early in May 2014, Faculty Senate passed a vote of No Confidence in Finks and Pettigrew after we became aware of a proposal Finks turned in to the Board of Trustees that recommended, among other things, eliminating tenured faculty.

Below is the Defendant’s (Ashland University) Motion for Summary Judgement, in relation to the civil lawsuit brought forth by six former tenured Ashland University faculty members, who were essentially fired in August 2015 (with their employment ending in December 2016).

This document is essentially AU’s argument for why the university was in the right to terminate 14 tenured faculty members. Additionally, this is the first time I’ve seen the exact number of tenured faculty who were cut, as the university always hemmed and hawed and would never give a specific number, at least when reporters asked them questions.

One of the university’s main arguments is that simply terminating a tenured faculty member is in and of itself restructuring. According to Faculty Rules and Regulations, the university can indeed eliminate tenured faculty if there is a reorganization of a program or department. However, for the university to argue that the termination of a faculty member is a reorganization means that tenure at AU is meaningless.

A couple weeks ago, I talked to my daughter’s sixth-grade cluster about memoir writing. It was a wonderful surprise to find a Newtown Bee reporter in the class that day, because she was there to write a story about my class visit.

“With sixth grade students in Michelle Vaccaro and Courtney Martin’s cluster seated before him, district parent and local author Matt Tullis discussed writing and his recently published book, Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer, on September 25.

“’We’re so happy that you are here to talk about writing,’ said Ms Vaccaro, adding that the students were lucky Mr Tullis’s daughter Lily was in the cluster to arrange the first guest speaker visit of the school year.”

One year ago today, I was celebrating the fact that Running With Ghosts had just gone on sale when I received a message via Facebook from a Maryanne Gabriele. The name didn’t look familiar, but I went ahead and read it anyway.

She included a photo, along with the sentence, “That’s me and Melissa right before she was diagnosed.”

The first sentence gave of her message me chills. I knew of Maryanne, from my talks with Melissa’s mom, Louise. But I had never pushed further, never tried to get in touch with her. It was a lapse in my reporting, because if I had, I would have learned so much more about Melissa. But I was also leery about reaching out to another stranger and asking them to talk to me about someone who had died so long ago. I told myself that I didn’t really have time; that I had to get the book done and that was that.

I read Maryanne’s message a couple times, thinking that she must have sent it because she knew Running With Ghosts had just come out. But there was nothing in the message saying anything about the book, and I realized that she probably didn’t know about it, which made her message to me, on that day, all the more incredible.

Her response:

I still don’t know what to make of the randomness of Maryanne reaching out to me about a story I wrote about her best friend two years earlier, and having that message land in my inbox directly on the day that story became a book. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but Melissa did. She kept her faith even as her hours waned, a faith I gave up the moment I learned she had died. Melissa was also a planner extraordinaire. She planned her father’s 50th birthday party from her hospital bed. She planned her own funeral.

If anyone could ever pull something like this off twenty-four years after she died — somehow connecting the best friend of her life with a kid she knew while battling cancer, all on the day that kid’s book came out, it would be her.

Eleven days before about 23 Ashland University faculty — many of them tenured — received letters letting them know their jobs were being terminated, the university announced that Scott Van Loo was being promoted from vice president of marketing and enrollment to executive vice president.

Van Loo held the job of executive vice president for a little more than a year before leaving to become vice president of enrollment at Cedarville University, but that job came with a hefty pay raise, according to the 2015 IRS 990 form filed by AU with the federal government. That form covers AU’s fiscal year, which ran from June 1, 2015-May 31, 2016, however the figures in the table below, according to IRS instructions for Schedule J (which is where the table below appears), include salaries for the calendar year ending within the organization’s fiscal year, which in this case was 2015

According to those forms (both the 2014 and the 2015 filing), Van Loo’s reportable compensation went from $115,902 in 2014 to $154,799 in 2015, the year he was promoted, an increase of $38,897, or 33.6 percent. His total compensation jumped from $137,848 to $180,453, an increase of $42,605.

Taken from page 47 of Ashland University 2015 IRS 990 form

This raise came at a time when Carlos Campo, who had just taken over as AU president in June of that year, was saying that the university was not OK financially.

And yet, Van Loo received a raise that was close to the amount that AU paid newly hired professors for an entire year. For a little bit of perspective, consider that my first contract as a faculty member at AU came in at $47,000, just about $8,100 more than Van Loo’s raise.

I spent eight years at Ashland University as a professor. I was originally hired in the English Department. At the start of my third year, I helped form the new Journalism and Digital Media department. I obtained tenure and was promoted to associate professor in 2014, the year before Van Loo’s promotion. All told, my base compensation increased a grand total of $7,875 from 2007 through 2016, a 16.75 percent increase. The vast majority of that increase came from the 10.5 percent raise, or $5,214, that I got when I was granted tenure and was promoted to associate professor.

Because the university was in dire financial straights in 2015, faculty didn’t get an across-the-board, cost-of-living raise for the second straight year. The only faculty who did get a raise were those who were tenured and promoted, a decision that is made by the Board of Trustees, usually in January (one of the professors who was tenured and promoted in January 2015 was terminated eight months later in Campo’s cuts).

Despite the fact that faculty were not getting raises, other university administrators did in 2015.

Stephen Storck, the vice president of finance and administration, received a 2.8 percent raise that year. That took his pay up to $165,550. Margaret Pomfret, the vice president of development saw her pay increase by 3.4 percent, up to $149,096. Just two years earlier, in 2013, Pomfret had made $137,095, meaning that in the two years that faculty received no raises, Pomfret’s pay increased by $12,001, or 8.8 percent.

Even the position of provost, which in 2015-16 was an interim position, saw a significant increase in pay. Douglas Fiore was hired originally by AU to be the new dean of the College of Education, but he took over as interim provost when Frank Pettigrew was “pushed out” by the board after a nearly unanimous vote of no confidence against him and former president Fred Finks by the AU Faculty Senate in May 2014.

I use quotation marks around pushed out, though, because Pettigrew remained on the payroll. He received $153,682 in 2014 despite having no job responsibilities other than being a consultant for the university. The following year, despite being interim, Fiore was paid $166,527, an 8.4 percent increase over what Pettigrew’s final full-year contract paid him.

Taken from page 17 of Ashland University 2015 IRS 990 form

And even though Fiore was doing the provost job full-time, Pettigrew was still paid $59,760 in 2015, an amount that far exceeds what many AU professors, particularly those in the College of Arts and Sciences, make in an entire contract year. I never made more than $56,883 (which was my base compensation plus supplemental contracts for things like advising student internships in 2014-15) in a single year at AU.

Taken from page 16 of Ashland University 2015 IRS 990 form

And, of course, AU was paying at least two presidents in 2015. Campo was paid $204,354 during his first semester as president, which means his annual contract probably comes out to more than $400,000 (which in and of itself should infuriate faculty, given the fact that’s about a 14 percent raise over what Finks made in his final year as president.

William Crothers, who served as interim president in 2014-15, made $140,727 in 2014 and $144,382 the following year. It’s not ridiculous to assume that that means he was paid $285,109 to be president (which is a bargain compared to what Fred Finks was being paid before him!). Crothers kicked off the faculty cuts in October 2014 when he informed 15 faculty members they were losing their jobs.

Finally, in 2015, AU paid Fred Finks $349,959, which is a little less than the $350,972 he made in 2014 (which included one semester — the spring — in which he was president, a semester that ended in Faculty Senate’s vote of no confidence).

The following was written by Fairfield University senior Nicole Funaro for my Sports Journalism course. The assignment called on them to interview a nationally-recognized sports writer. Nicole talked with Thomas Lake. — Matt

It only took two rings before I was greeted with a cautious “hello.” His voice sounded like he had been debating whether or not to pick up, and understandably so, considering an unknown Connecticut number lit up the screen of the Atlanta-based writer’s phone. But once I nervously, yet proudly asserted that I was one of Matt’s students, his voice smoothed and softened. Our introduction and opening pleasantries gave way to my first question, and then I, the novice, was tasked with interviewing the seasoned professional. And this “seasoned professional” wasn’t just anyone; it was CNN Digital’s senior writer, Thomas Lake.

While Lake now sits atop CNN’s digital news outlet, he never dreamed of holding such a title — that is, he never dreamed of it because he never set out to pursue journalism in the first place. As a student at Herkimer Community College in upstate New York, Lake was a general studies major with little idea of what career he’d pursue, something that followed him even as he began Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts a few years later. However, inspiration finally came when he took a feature writing class with a professor named Steve Crowe.

“I’d always enjoyed writing, and taking this class sort of showed me what the possibilities were,” he said. “That someone could spend their career and actually get paid telling exciting stories — it sounded very appealing to me.”

That wasn’t the only thing Lake got out of Crowe’s class: Crowe helped him land an internship in the fall of his senior year at the Salem News, a paper for which Crowe previously worked. Following his senior year, a young Lake bounced from working at a twice-weekly newspaper in rural Georgia — a paper where he said he “got to make some of [his] worst rookie mistakes on a very small stage” — to serving as a full-time staffer at the Salem Times, to finally landing what he thought was his dream job with the St. Petersburg Times.

But by 2008, Lake was already eyeing his next move and decided to send an email to one of his favorite writers, Gary Smith.

“Amazingly,” Lake said, “he wrote back. I sent him a story I had done at the St. Petersburg Times, and he liked it well enough that he got on the phone to the big boss, the editor of Sports Illustrated in New York, and said, ‘Hey, you should give this kid a chance.’”

And the rest, as they say, is history. He stayed with the magazine until 2015 when his position was eliminated due to budget cuts, then taking his knack for storytelling to CNN as an “outsider” looking in on the complex world of politics. With a book about the 2016 presidential election (“Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything”) under his belt, a circuitous career to look back on and more still to come, Lake said the topics he writes about are of little importance; in fact, he doesn’t much care for sports or politics. Instead, he looks for universal themes to transform into rich stories.

“I love finding moments of human drama and split-second decisions people make that have long-term consequences,” he explained, something he certainly achieved in his most famous work, “2 on 5.”

A time-hopping wonder that simultaneously foreshadows and reflects, Lake’s omniscient approach to telling the story of an underdog Alabama basketball team in “2 on 5” shelves the traditional Cinderella story and talks fate, hardship, redemption and demise. For Lake, weaving the intricate tale required some contemplation of his own.

“I think a huge part of the best writing is thinking — stopping and thinking,” he said. “There was so much that I did on that story in particular, just sitting there in silence with no distractions, nothing fragmenting my attention at all and sitting alone in a cheap hotel room.”

It seems that minimizing distraction has been Lake’s MO all along; once he decided to pursue journalism, he’s never once broken his focus, always keeping his eyes fixed on his next move. Even when considering budding journalists, Lake offered more of the same.

“Report and write as much as you can,” he said. “Keep a journal or some other kind of notebook. Sit on the quad and just write descriptions of what you’re seeing — your sensory experiences — because all that just flexes those muscles. Ultimately, you’re only as good as your ability to put experiences into words, and so you’ve got to be practicing that and then reading the best writing.”

I hung up the phone and sat in amazement. “I just spoke to a writer for CNN, a place that maybe I’ll work some day,” I thought. After all, that’s why I wanted to interview him in the first place: to make a connection at an organization where maybe I too could catch one of the lucky breaks that seemed to mark Lake’s own career.

As I reflected on our conversation, a wave of mixed emotions consumed me. I was at once hungry for the experiences he’s had, envious of his writing abilities and hopeful. Hopeful that if I keep writing just like he advised, maybe I could carve out a similar place for myself in journalism. I ran through the rest of the day hearing two rings of the phone and three words echoing in my head: just keep writing.